Sunday Afternoon Radio

I previously wrote about a relatively new (since September) right wing talker on local radio on Sundays, Lores Rizkalla. When her bit gets cut short, I’ve switched over to KTRH’s sister station, KPRCfor nationally sindicated Gun Talk.

Today Rizkalla only had an hour to talk about how she’s proud that the country elected a black president (her words), but that she still has problems with his policies and his associates (bringing up the right wing bogey men several times). She eventually agreed with her callers that Obamagot elected because people wanted to votefor a black man (her words). I am actually looking forward to following her. She’s wing nut lite and doesn’t have any original ideas, but even still, she has potential to come out with some doozies.

The Gun Talkshow may get a little tiresome, but the website may have some interesting information. The first thing I heard when switching stations was about Obama’stransition website. The host, Tom Gresham, gave out a URL with a cached page from the site. The information there, according to Gresham, is scandalous:

Address Gun Violence in Cities: As president, Barack Obama would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve guncrimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals who shouldn’t have them. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent, as such weapons belong on foreign battlefields and not on our streets.

So, why is it a cached and not live? I don’t know, but Gresham thinks it’s because he started talking about it around 1:00 CST this afternoon.

What’s to oppose in the policy statement? Well, first off, Gresham agreed with his guest (didn’t catch the name, sorry) that local law enforcement already has access to all the information they need to trace guns and giving them any more access would just allow them to go fishing around in gun owners’ information. Really? That sound awfully paranoid to me. Of course Gresham, as a part of the gun industry and stating that he has just returned from a gun show, doesn’t think there is a gun show loophole. That just doesn’t comport with reality. Gresham even mocked the idea of making guns childproof.

Here at the end of his show, Gresham is talking in ‘fighting’ terms about defeating elected officials at the ballot box, like 1994!!!!!11111!!! WOLVERINES.

I can’t find a podcast yet, but I’ll keep looking. Meanwhile, here’s a tidbit from the “Truth Squad”section of Gresham’s website:

School shootings in Virginia and Mississippi were stopped by students and a vice principal who ran to their cars and got guns. The shooters gave up when faced with someone who had a gun. At the Trolley Square shooting (in a mall) in Salt Lake City, Utah, an off-duty police officer had a gun in a “gun free” mall (I guess it wasn’t so gun-free after all). He distracted and delayed the shooter, saving lives.

There is a difference between feeling safe and being safe. You will hear people talk about wanting to feel safe. Offer the idea that it’s more important to actually be safe. The police are good, but they can’t be everywhere. Victims are everywhere, so they are the “first responders” to a crime.

“Gun Free” zones stop only honest people from having guns, making them less safe. If the idea is to get rid of all guns to make an area “safe,” then prohibit the police from carrying guns there. No? Because we know that a trained person with a gun can stop a murderer. Doesn’t matter if that person is wearing a uniform.

The school shooting in Virginia is not the one you probably first thought of, but rather this one. Whether or not the armed students stopped any further deaths is disputed. In the Mississippi shooting, the vice principal kept the shooter from leaving. If Gresham can’t be honest in how he advocates his positions, why should he be taken seriously?

19 responses to “Sunday Afternoon Radio”

It’s cached because as soon as the gun owning community started drawing attention to it on the internet, it was taken down.

The problem that the Tiarht amendment addresses is not police access to gun tracking information, it is that information being made available to city governments for propaganda and the pursuit of nuisance law suits (see Bloomburg, Michael). The police have full access to the information when they need it. Have you ever noticed that the same papers in which you read editorials about Police not having access to this information include the supposedly unavailable information in reports about crimes?

If the information isn’t released when it is needed, how, exactly, do they find these things out?

Finally, the ATF itself opposes repealing the Tiarht amendment. They contend that releasing the raw data would compromise investigations and undermine law enforcement activities. The ATF itself provides summaries and statistical analysis of the information so there is no need for the raw data to be released to the public or to government entities for anything other than criminal investigations.

Finally, you are flat out wrong about the “gun show loophole”.

Every sale that requires a background check outside a gun show, equally requires one inside a gun show.

Gun shows are not magical places where the laws are suspended. The laws still apply there just like anywhere else.

What the anti-liberty advocates are talking about re “closing the gun show loophole” is actually creating a special case in the law that only applies at gun shows.

The whole “loophole” terminology is nothing more than another instance of their use of misleading terms to frame the discussion in a way to make their position more palatable to the (typically ignorant) general public.

because as soon as the gun owning community started drawing attention to it on the internet, it was taken down

That’s your assumption. You don’t know why, but speculate on!

I tend to have a healthy respect for my local police department , and being a native of Houston, that sayd a lot. Our police department has come a long way in terms of civil rights and protecting as opposed to persecuting its citizens. I find your and the radio hosts’ nitpicking about possible police abuse pathetic. You all should fight something real and not some phantom.

I’ll look into you ATF claims, but as they stand right now without credible links, they are nothing more than claims — anyone can make a claim — see the debunking in my post.

Please show me — with more than just your word — how I and the future Obama administration are wrong.

On that same radio show, I heard a lot about the arguments that anti-law and order advocates (see two can play the labeling game!) should put forward.

Re: Stopping the student from leaving . . . wouldn’t it have been a good thing if someone had stopped Cho when he was leaving the scene of his first crime, before shooting all those other people an hour later at Virginia Tech? A murderer leaving the scene is likely to go kill other people.

“Childproofing” guns is an old technique of the gun-control crowd of making guns basically unusable. When the CDC and the National Safety Council say that accidental shooting deaths of children is at an all-time low (numbers, not rates), it’s clear that the education programs put on by gun owners are working. If only we could get the gun-control groups to join us in gun-safety programs. Alas, they refuse to help.

Hi Mr. Gresham. I’ve listened to your show the past couple of weekends while doing yard work. Very interesting.

Thanks for the link to the podcast, it will let me grab the name of your guest and do a little more digging.

You seem to be mixing two events together (again). At the time of Cho’s first shooting, no one knew he had done it. No one saw him leaving. You could just as easily argue that the postal employees should have stopped him — with the same lack of success.

I find your argument about childproofing gun callous — and reflective of someone who is a bit lazy. There are enough irresponsible gun owners in my state of Texas to warrant keeping a law on the books that criminalizes lazy gun owners.

Please point out where I said anything about “possible police abuse”. I, in fact, specifically said that such wasn’t a concern. Is it just easier to slay straw men than to actually address what I said?

Not that it will make any difference, since you seem more inclined to be dismissive and condescending than actually evaluate information on its merits…but I’ll save you the effort of looking it up

Anyone can play the labeling game. The anti-liberty crowd has it down to a science.

The difference is my label is accurate. Yours is not and is, therefore, specious and misleading. We’re not advocating violating the law. We are advocating keeping the law limited in scope so that our rights are not infringed by it. We are actually the exact opposite of what your poor attempt at labeling would imply.

Your side (you’ll notice that I didn’t lump you with them in my initial comment…I gave you the benefit of the doubt) is dedicated to limiting the liberty that is ours by birthright and protected by the Constitution. I used to call the Brady’s, FSA, Joyce, et al “anti-gun”; however they have recently taken the tack of presenting themselves as gun owners in an effort to lend themselves credibility. They themselves claim not to be “anti-gun”: they only oppose the liberty of those who choose to own guns of which they disapprove or for reasons they don’t accept. Hence the title.

You may not LIKE the title, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate…or yours for us any more so.

Finally: how, exactly, do you propose that I “prove” that the law doesn’t say something?

I can’t prove a negative short of quoting the entire (quite extensive) sections of federal and state law to demonstrate that they do not contain provisions that constitute a “loophole” regarding gun shows.

You are the one making the contention that there is such a “loophole”. Prove it. Quote the section of law that is being taken advantage of…the section that creates this special case for gun shows that does not exist anywhere else.

Of course, I won’t be holding my breath…I have no doubt that your reply will be nothing more than continued haughty dismissal and contempt for any information that doesn’t neatly fit into your preconceived worldview…not to mention the fact that there IS no gun show loophole and so you can’t provide evidence of it even if you want to.

Why should I even read much less respond to anything you have to say? If you want to argue over the meaning of words, do so.

since you seem more inclined to be dismissive and condescending than actually evaluate information

I’m sure you will take my comment in the wrong way, sorry in advance.

About the dot com site going down because of your effort, see my earlier comment.

I’ll admit it is late and I will respond to the rest of your comment when I get home from work tomorrow. It’s a working girl’s dilemma. I only blog or even comment from home — not during work. If you have a problem with that, sorry.

If you didn’t intend your comment to be dismissive and condescending, I apologize for taking it that way. That’s just how it seemed to me.

I didn’t say that the “dot com site” went down because of my (or our) effort. Only noted that it happened very soon after this (and many other issues posted on that site) began getting some attention on the blogs. This has been a common occurrence with the Obama campaign since the beginning. They post something, bloggers begin pointing it out and criticizing it, and then either the information disappears or the site goes down completely. That’s why bloggers have gotten into the habit of caching and/or screen capturing anything on the Obama sites that they comment upon (you didn’t think a bit unusual that Gresham just happened to have a cached version of the page available?). Either Obama’s site administrators provide the most unreliable service on the internet, or something is up with that. Again, I’m not speculating as to what…just noting the unusual nature of the situation. Take it as you will.

As far as why you should listen to me…that’s completely up to you. Unless you are completely intolerant of differing perspectives, what’s the harm in it? If you are confident that your position is correct and is based upon fact rather than fallacy, there should be no reason for you to fear those facts being challenged should there?

I really enjoyed seeing how Gresham’s annotation of the ‘cached’ page displays his skill at highlighting. The yellowed ‘gun’ repeating throughout reminded me of the SNL skit about dogs & what they actually hear (e.g. ‘blah-blah-blah-blah-Dora-blah-blah-Dora-blah-blah’). Can anyone say: OBSESSIVE?

First Sailor, if you scoll up you will see your first comment is this:

It’s cached because as soon as the gun owning community started drawing attention to it on the internet, it was taken down.

Then you said this a little later:

I noted correlation, I didn’t speculate on causation.

and then this:

I didn’t say that the “dot com site” went down because of my (or our) effort. Only noted that it happened very soon after this (and many other issues posted on that site) began getting some attention on the blogs.

You have modified what you originally said. If you meant to only point out correlation the first time, why didn’t you? Why did you use the word because? It’s cached because it’s no longer live. Why is it no longer live?

You claim that the Obama campaign has a track record that would lead you to have the opinion you do. Having worked on a website that’s part of a larger organization, I’m more likely to think it’s technical problems. This sort of transition site is new and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some problems. Secondly, there is nothing — nothing wrong or impolitic about what is on the cached page (which was originally live for what — 3 or 4 days?) And I had it right the first time — it’s a dot gov site (not dot com). There is no way that you can pass judgement on the competence of the administrators.

I don’t really enjoy scrollong up and down and copying and pasting comments one person made in the same thread and then decided s/he didn’t mean. Can you empathize?.

We can talk, and you are more than welcome to comment, but be clear in your writing, mean what you say and say what you mean. I do. I’m looking at the one link you offered now, so I’ll comment on it in a bit.

Sailorcurt, press releases from the Republican whom the bill is named after is not legit support for your assertions.

Try again.

Oh, and I forgot to hit on this remark:

(you didn’t think a bit unusual that Gresham just happened to have a cached version of the page available?)

No, I read a number of blogs that have made fools of themselves with this sort of amature sleuthing, and it spreads like a virus. I even heard it was on Drudge today and poof every radio talker is talking about it. No surprise there.

Apparently you’re more interested in parsing my English than addressing the pertinent points.

I was answering your specific question, to wit:

“So why is it cashed and not live”

Which would be why my response began with “It’s cached because…”

The “It’s cached” part being conveniently left off of your misrepresentation of my statement.

Whether your misrepresentation of my statement was intentional or or stemmed from an honest misunderstanding of my point, it was no less inaccurate…considering that you “say what you mean and mean what you say” and all.

Boiling the controversial statement down to it’s bare meaning, What I said was “It’s cached because it was taken down. The rest was nothing more than noting the correlation between the factual event and the implication of what may have caused it.

The fact that your focus is on an interpretation of what I meant by that relatively innocuous statement and not on the much more relevant points speaks volumes to your openness to dissenting opinions.

Which, honestly, doesn’t surprise me much.

I do try my humanly imperfect best to say what I mean and mean what I say…I cannot control how you choose to misinterpret or misrepresent my words in an effort (whether conscious or unconscious) to rationalize avoiding the real issues.

It’s nothing more than the old magician’s trick of waving the hands around to distract from what is actually important.

Speaking of which…have you fund that section of code that creates the “gun show loophole” yet?

I’ll even help you in your quest: The relevant sections of federal code and regulation that pertain to the firearms are enacted in Title 18, US Code, Chapter 44; Title 26, US Code, Chapter 53; Title 22 US Code, Chapter 2778; Title 27, Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter II, Parts 447, 478 and 479; and Title 28 Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter I, Part 25.

Considering that the Brady’s contend that the firearms industry is the most unregulated industry in the US, there sure are a lot of laws that pertain to them…at any rate, take your time. There’s no rush.

As far as dismissing the information in the link I provided, that also doesn’t surprise me. If you notice, the document that you dismiss out of hand contained excerpts and quotes from the ATF and the FOP themselves expressing their support for the Tiahrt amendment. I’m not sure how much more authoritative you can get than that…but, I suppose, it is much more convenient to simply dismiss any information counter to what you wish to be true than it is to have to face address that information on its face.

How about a letter from the current acting director of the BATFE, Micheal Sullivan, which states, in part:

ATF considers this information law-enforcement-sensitive because it is often the first investigative lead in a case. We treat it no differently than fingerprint matches and other crime-scene information, since disclosure outside of law enforcement can tip off criminals to the investigation, compromise cases and endanger the lives of undercover officers, witnesses and confidential sources.

No matter. I can see that your mind is made up and no minor details like…say…facts…are going to dissuade you from the conclusions you’ve obviously already reached.

I’ve done a little poking around and found a post at Boing Boing. You and I both know that you were trying to claim, just as Gresham did, that you all somehow put pressure on the Obama team and that made them take the links down. Don’t try to hide your pride in that claim. The thing is, this type of pressure works well with some politicians and on some issues and not others.

As I understand it, the gun show loophole is just that. If you give me hotlinks to look at instead of asking me to dig through laws to prove my own point, that works for me.

You and I disagree, that much is clear. I’ve always thought that the point of having a discussion is to learn from others. One of the reasons I listen to conservative radio is to hear their arguments. Mostly they are pretty weak. You have a passion in your comments here, and outside of jumping the gun (!) with regard to whether I had put you in moderation or banned you and in two minutes concluding that I am somehow typical, well, I don’t think nor act that way.